University of Illinois at Chicago: Virtual Reality’s CAVE Pioneer
Brad Grimes, Ed Tech, January 30, 2013

Wow, this feels like a black from the past, reading about the CAVE - the first CAVE was launched in 1992. The idea was to create a fully enclosed virtual environment (similar to what we would today call the holodeck). This article talks about CAVE2, launched last October. More...

Hotspots and have-nots
John C. Abell, Reuters, January 30, 2013

Interesting perspective on the One Laptop Per Child project. As summarized by Alexander Russo, "the main problem Negroponte faced was that the problem he proposed solving -- getting computers into peoples' hands -- was about to be solved on its own through cheap smartphones and netbooks. The main problem he didn't solve -- Internet access -- remained a massive obstacle.  The solution? According to this columnist, it's a massive universal Internet access initiative." It's hard to imagine how good internet access for all would not change things for the better. More...

EEF / Toolkit
Education Endowment Foundation, January 30, 2013

Seb Schmoller points to a really interesting site that summarizes a couple dozen popular educational interventions and assesses their effectiveness in promoting positive educational outcomes. The presentation is a bit unintuitive - the interventions are scored in terms of cost (that's clear enough), stars (representing the number of studies supporting the assessment), and effectiveness (confusingly represented in terms of months - so, for example, the 'average impact' of peer tutoring is '+6 additional months', whatever that means). More...

Both MOOCs and Textbooks Will End Up Courseware
Mike Caulfield, Hapgood, January 30, 2013

Where are MOOCs headed? Not toward massive classes, writes Mike Caulfield. "It’s broadly used courseware — software that provides much of the skeleton of standard classes the way publisher texts do today." That's my call as well. More...

US Department of State Unveils Open Book Project
Cable Green, Creative Commons, January 29, 2013

The United States government yesterday announced "the Open Book Project (remarks, fact sheet, press notice), an initiative to expand access to free, high-quality educational materials in Arabic." While no doubt this initiative has a political purpose, it doesn't follow that it merits criticism on that basis. The proof will be in the content of the material, and whether it serves the more generic objective of advancing eduation for Arab-speaking people. More...

Why I’m Now Embedding ORCID Metadata in PDFs
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, January 29, 2013

Brian Kelly suggests that PDF authors should encode metadata into the PDF file so Google will be able to retrieve it. In addition to including the title of the work, he suggests that authors include the ORCID author id (ORCID stands for 'Open Researcher and Contributor ID' - of course it goes without saying that now everyone who creates a PDF will be an 'open researcher or contributor'). More...

Imaginative Education
Den Groom, YouTube, January 29, 2013

Dean Groom shared the following message with TALO: "A video I've made (short) about a project I'm working on via http://www.ierg.net. Should start 2014 in public. Right now working on an 'app' for want of better term, which is about peer-feedback using game-like methods. The actual IE programme is already in play, I'm trying to create a technological-connection between students and teachers to provide a feedback loop anonymously. Think Suga Mitra meets 4 Square. Anyone into this sort of stuff?" Even if you don't have time to watch videos (I rarely have time, though Groom's 40-second video wasn't too much for me) do check out the Imaginative Education Research Group website s it contains much more than just a few videos. More...

Revolution Hits the Universities
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, January 28, 2013

Thomas L. Friedman gushes about MOOCs. "I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment." I think we need to understand that 'best' does not mean (as it currently seems to) 'best marketed'. More...

The Post-2015 Development Agenda: time to learn and connect
Alicia Mitchell, eLearning Africa News Portal, January 28, 2013
Though rates have varied a lot, access to education in Africa has been improving. But it has not proven to be a panacea. "The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has found that over half of the global extremely poor live in a household where the head does, in fact, have some degree of education. This means that education in and of itself is not currently a guaranteed path out of poverty." Of course, bobody should have presented it as such; education is a necessary but not sufficient condition. More...

Making Off I Congreso y II Feria de Innovación Educativa ÁVACO 2012
Monica Leguizamón, YouTube, January 28, 2013

Six minute video created while I was in Ibague, Colombia. I am responding in real-time to questions posed to me, so I'm not speaking as quickly as I might with prepared text. Still, it gives a good overview of my thoughts on e-learning and especially e-learning in Latin America. More...